King's Gambit

by Paul Hoffman

  MAN-MACHINE ENCOUNTERS SEEM TO BRING OUT THE WORST IN TOP grandmasters: they self-destruct in ways that they never would against fleshy opponents. In the fall of 2002, Vladimir Kramnik, Kasparov’s successor as world champion, sought revenge for humanity in an eight-game match against Deep Fritz, one of Deep Blue’s mechanical confederates. (The “deep” means that the machine has more than one processor, unlike most desktop computers, which have only a single brain.) The match rules were designed to eliminate the inequities inherent in Kasparov’s encounter, but they swung too much in the other direction, in the human’s favor. Well in advance of the play, Deep Fritz’s handlers had to provide the world champion with a copy of the software and promise not to change it subsequently. The latter requirement put the machine at a deficit: human competitors, after all, are free to adjust their playing style anytime they want.

  “It was a terrible thing,” said Frederic Friedel, co-founder of ChessBase, the manufacturer of Deep Fritz. “Kramnik had Fritz’s brain in a bottle. He could figure out what Fritz would play in a given position. Imagine that you and I are having a debate tomorrow. And today we practice first. You say something stupid and I completely refute it. Well, tomorrow you’ll be on your guard and won’t say the same thing. But a clone of you would repeat the same stupid argument. Kramnik had a clone of Fritz.”

  Even with that edge, however, Kramnik couldn’t beat the computer. Throughout the match, he let himself be psyched out by the knowledge that his opponent was looking at millions of positions per second—even though he knew that it was doing ineffectual busywork, because the vast majority of those positions were nonsense and didn’t warrant examination at all. Nonetheless, there was always the theoretical possibility that a counterintuitive continuation, which a human master would normally not even consider, let alone play, might turn out to be best. Kramnik became obsessed with this remote possibility and couldn’t stop himself from considering improbable moves. And yet he knew that this approach was self-defeating; in the precious finite time his plodding human brain had to study the position, he should have been trying to assess which of the few natural-looking moves was actually the strongest. If Kasparov had convinced himself that Deep Blue couldn’t have beaten him without human aid, Kramnik had succumbed to the delusion that he could outcalculate the calculator.

  Kramnik still might have won had he consistently played the cautious, largely defensive chess for which he was known: at the start of the sixth game, he was ahead by a full point. But he then threw his lead away when he imprudently launched a sacrificial attack that the supercomputer easily rebuffed. “I wanted to be a hero,” he told me later on the phone. “I had fallen in love with the sacrifice. I was seduced by the apparent beauty and at the time I thought that I was playing the most brilliant game of my career.” But the machine came up with a nimble defense that he’d missed. The eight-game match ended in a tie.

  IT TOOK KASPAROV SIX YEARS TO RECOVER FROM HIS MATCH WITH DEEP Blue and publicly jump back into the ring with a machine. Now that Kramnik had had the guts to take on a computer and play it to a tie, Kasparov was eager both to avenge his own humiliation by Deep Blue and upstage Kramnik by performing better than him. In early 2003, Kasparov faced a program called Deep Junior in six games in New York City. This time, the organizers tried to strike a balance between the computer-friendly conditions of the Deep Blue competition and the pro-human rules of Kramnik’s contest. The programmers had to provide Kasparov with a current copy of the software in advance, but they were then allowed to tinker with it all they wanted—except during an actual game.

  Friedel predicted Kasparov would triumph as long as he was cautious. “Junior is a street brawler,” Friedel told me before the match. “You remember West Side Story? It’s the Jets. It will be constantly taunting Garry, ‘Do you want to fight with knives? Whips? Pistols? Machine guns? You choose the weapon.’ If he knows what’s best for him, he’ll say, ‘Let’s stay in the ring and keep these big soft gloves on.’ But it’s not his nature to duck a challenge.”

  Indeed, initially Kasparov did not play it safe. In the first game, he came out swinging with a hyperaggressive pawn thrust on the seventh move and won decisively. By the start of the sixth and final game, the machine had fought back to tie the match—winning a game when Kasparov blundered in a better position and drawing the three other encounters. In the final game, Kasparov sacrificed the exchange on the twenty-third move, and the few hundred spectators cheered and rose out of their seats. Five moves later, though, Kasparov blinked: at his instigation, man and machine agreed to a draw, not in a lifeless position but in a knotty unbalanced situation full of fight. Against a human opponent, he would certainly have continued and in all likelihood clawed his way to a win. The carbon-based chess fans were disappointed that, just as they were beginning to smell the kill, the alpha male of their species had chickened out. The audience hissed and booed. “Kasparov’s a pussy!” one kibitzer shouted.

  “I was exhausted,” Kasparov told me afterward. As with Deep Blue, he had once again let an encounter with a machine play games with his head. He had been obsessed with idea that Deep Junior would never tire. “The machine is never distracted by an argument with its mother,” he told me, “or a lack of sleep. My goal was simple—not to lose.”

  LATER THAT YEAR ESPN INVITED ME TO BE THE COLOR COMMENTATOR FOR Kasparov’s final effort at proving himself against a machine—this time, X3D Deep Fritz of Hamburg, in a four-game match at the New York Athletic Club in midtown Manhattan, just below Central Park. (The number of games in these matches had progressively fallen from eight when Kramnik took on Fritz, to six when Kasparov faced Junior, to four here—so that human fatigue would be less of a factor.) My fellow commentator was Seattle GM Yasser Seirawan, four-time U.S. champion. The host was Jamaican-born Maurice Ashley, a charismatic grandmaster whose e-mail handle “FirstBlackGM” aptly encapsulated his groundbreaking chess career. Ashley, who lives in Brooklyn, has a brother and sister who are both kickboxing champions. “It’s scary to see them sit around and watch videos of their fights, vicariously reliving every brutal moment. I prefer to take my hostilities out on the chessboard. Step outside,” Maurice joked, “and I’ll smash your Sicilian.”

  The New York Athletic Club was a strange venue for a chess match. It was a stuffy members-only institution whose name was incongruous with the formality of the place. Even though I was covering the match for ESPN, I was initially barred from the athletic club because I had the audacity to wear running shoes. Many scruffy chess fans were never admitted because they were not wearing—and did not own—the requisite attire. Maurice and I joked about the irony of the match being held at a club that not so long ago would have refused to admit both him and Kasparov, a Jew. Given that I don’t play sports or watch them—I couldn’t tell you the rules of football—it was also ironic that I was now an ESPN commentator.

  The match would air live on ESPN2, after a show on the World’s Strongest Man Competition. Besides the Fischer-Spassky contest thirty years earlier, there was not much precedent for live televised coverage of chess in the United States, and the ESPN show had its bugs. My Telestrator was broken for all four games, so that I was unable to demonstrate moves on the on-screen board. Yasser’s Telestrator worked fine, but I couldn’t do my job of interrupting him and asking Everyman questions—“Why doesn’t he just retreat the queen there?”—when his grandmasterly analysis went over the heads of the audience. Fortunately his explanations were good, and Maurice kept things moving by trotting out every sports analogy, and then some, to get across what was happening on the chessboard. I had memorized every juicy chess anecdote I could find, every nugget of chess history, and all the dirt I could turn up on Kasparov, so that I was able to fill the airtime when the Russian went into a long think. The three of us had fun interpreting Kasparov’s body language: When he took off his watch, the position was complicated and he was getting down to business. When he took off his jacket, things were very serious. When he put hi
s watch back on, it was a signal that he was about to finish off his opponent.

  There were operational difficulties besides the Telestrator. The restroom at the New York Athletic Club was inconveniently located several hundred feet from the ESPN set, and so our producer prohibited us during commercial breaks from removing our earpieces and mikes and running to the bathroom. He feared we might not make it back to our seats and get wired up in time. He ordered us not to have caffeine or other diuretics on the morning of the show. He thought that holding our bladders during the first game might be a problem, because we were scheduled to be on the air on ESPN2 for three hours.

  The game was a thrilling slugfest with the machine opting to give up a rook for a bishop in order to slow down Kasparov’s attack. Maurice, Yasser, and I scrupulously avoided the bottled water on our anchor table until the last commercial break, when the control room said through our earpieces: “Drink up, boys! Soothe those parched throats! We’re off the air in six minutes.” We each downed a large bottle of Poland Spring. With only two minutes remaining and the game still going, the controller announced that there had been a change of plans: the show’s ratings were so good that we were going to preempt the scheduled programming and continue live coverage until the game was over. Maurice and I looked at each other in disbelief—the game, which seemed quite complicated, could last a few more hours. “Try to hold it, guys,” the controller barked into our ears. “You don’t want to short-circuit the set!”

  Call it special prejudice—we had wanted our human confederate to win the game, and he had a material advantage on the board, but his king was suddenly under assault. Now we found ourselves improbably rooting for a quick draw so that we could make it to the lavatory. Caissa, the goddess of chess, evidently understood our dilemma: six moves and twenty-five minutes later, the machine cleverly forced a draw by perpetual check.

  The computer won the second game after Kasparov missed a simple tactic in time pressure. Then Kasparov evened the match in the third game by strangling Fritz with classic anti-computer play: as White, he steered the game into a closed position, where normally powerful pieces were limited in their mobility, and long-term planning was more important than calculation. The last game was anticlimatic: Kasparov as Black selected a defense in which the majority of pieces and pawns were quickly exchanged, and he played carefully to a draw on the twenty-seventh move. The best human player ever, and arguably the most battle-hardened, had once again chickened out.

  After this event, the competitions between man and machine lost their novelty and allure. The chess world had grown weary of watching Kramnik and Kasparov muddle their way to ties in three successive matches. Chess fans turned their attention back to the stressful struggles at the board between flesh-and-blood players. The rhythm of intra-species games was more familiar, and there was always the chance for added excitement if the players spun out of control, like NASCAR racers, and injured themselves, their opponents, or the furniture in their hotel.

  IN THE FALL OF 2006, VLADIMIR KRAMNIK PUT HIS WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP on the line in an event that had long been anticipated, a match that would, after thirteen confusing years, finally unify the two competing world titles—Kramnik’s classical one, whose lineage included Kasparov, Fischer, and Botvinnik, and FIDE’s “cheaper” title, which was granted in a shorter match at a faster time control. The FIDE champion was a reserved Bulgarian named Veselin Topalov, whose playing style was anything but reserved. Kramnik was the stolid, risk-averse defender—his nickname was Iceman—and Topalov was the dreamy tactician who dramatically sacrificed pawns and pieces with ease and seemed to cook up kingside assaults out of thin air.

  The twelve-game match in Elista, Kalmykia, promised to be a battle royal. More people seemed to be rooting for Topalov, because they preferred his unrestrained approach to chess. They also held it against Kramnik that, unlike his predecessor Kasparov, he had been somewhat invisible in his half decade as world champion—never appearing, for instance, in the United States to promote the game.

  Despite Topalov’s chessboard aggression, he was known for having unsteady nerves. He was capable of mysteriously collapsing even when he had a large advantage. Playing Black in a Catalan Opening, Topalov could have achieved a draw in the first game by repeating moves, but instead he pressed for a win, blundered, and lost after seventy-five moves and six and a half hours. In the second game, he missed a winning combination on his thirty-second move, gave Kramnik too much counterplay, and lost a tricky endgame. After two successive draws, Kramnik had a commanding lead of 3–1.

  The playing area in Elista had been designed to minimize the possibility of cheating. Both combatants were routinely searched, even the heels of their shoes examined, to eliminate the possibility that they were receiving assistance through cell phones or miniature computers. The live audience at the tournament was separated from the players by a glass wall, and there was supposedly even an electromagnetic interference signal designed to block wireless communication to any concealed earpieces that they might be wearing. (At the 2006 World Open in Philadelphia, a few months before the Kramnik-Topalov match, a player was found to be wearing a tiny wireless earpiece through which he was suspected of receiving advice about the moves a computer would make in his position.) Each player was provided with a private rest area and an adjoining bathroom to which he could retire as often as he liked, but these rooms were searched before the games; in addition, a closed-circuit video system enabled the match arbiters to observe what each player was doing in the rest area (though not in the bathroom) during the play.

  After the fourth game, Topalov’s manager improperly obtained the videotape of Kramnik’s rest-area activity and protested to the appeals committee that the Russian had gone into the bathroom, where he could not be observed, a suspicious fifty times. The implication was that he was somehow cheating. Topalov’s manager demanded that Kramnik’s private potty be made off-limits, and the appeals committee—which had been handpicked by Kalmykian and FIDE president Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, who favored the FIDE champion Topalov—locked the bathroom before the fifth game, while also conceding that Kramnik’s visits to the loo were not quite as numerous as Topalov’s manager had alleged.

  “I was lying on my couch next to my toilet and was furious,” Kramnik recalled. “I did not think about the World Championship or the score. And then there was a new problem: I had to go to the bathroom, urgently. I asked the arbiter to open my toilet. He just shrugged and offered me an empty coffee cup.”

  Even though the appeals committee had essentially supported Topalov, his manager went one step further by demanding that an attendant now accompany Kramnik whenever he visited their now-common crapper—or else Topalov would refuse to shake his hand. Kramnik, a man of quiet dignity, found himself in the uncomfortable position of explaining his hydration and evacuation habits to a prying press and addressing the unspecified smear of foul play. Dubbed Krapnik, he quickly became the butt of jokes made by late-night comics and journalists around the world—a photo was posted on the Web in which Kramnik’s pants were stained in a spot that suggested he had actually visited the bathroom one time too few. Kramnik had had enough and refused to make a single move in the fifth game. FIDE promptly forfeited him.

  Top grandmasters, who had hoped that a unified world title would bring much-needed sponsorship dollars to the game, were crestfallen. “Once again chess has shot itself in the foot,” British GM John Nunn wrote on the Internet. “Who will want to sponsor a top-level chess match if the whole thing can grind to a halt over a dispute about a toilet? At least when the 1984/5 Karpov-Kasparov match was controversially terminated…, the players had managed to entertain the chess public with forty-eight games before everything collapsed in chaos. Apparently today’s players only have the stamina to manage four!”

  When Kramnik was forfeited, Toiletgate became an international incident. Ilyumzhinov happened to be meeting with Putin at the time, and the Russian leader made clear his support for his confederate K
ramnik and his displeasure at the whole unseemly incident. Ilyumzhinov rushed home to Kalmykia and fired the appeals committee. He unlocked Kramnik’s privy but added an attendant who was supposed to monitor what the Russian was doing. Putin then called Kramnik and urged him not to quit (as Henry Kissinger had similarly urged Fischer during his 1972 match with Spassky). Kramnik resumed the sixth game “under protest,” and, facing Topalov’s Queen’s Gambit, achieved a draw as Black. The seventh game was also drawn.

  Topalov’s manager then increased the psychological pressure by releasing a statement claiming that Fritz would have made 78 percent of the moves Kramnik had made so far, implying that the Russian had unlawful access to Fritz during the games. (Of course Kramnik and Fritz are world-class players with similar ratings in the 2700s, which is the simplest explanation for the commonality of their moves.) The assault on Kramnik’s integrity was now too much for him: with his nerves frayed, he collapsed in the next two games, allowing Topalov to pull ahead for the first time in the match, by one point. Now the grandmaster community was firmly in Kramnik’s camp, with many well-respected GMs releasing an open letter in which they condemned Topalov’s deplorable psychological warfare and urged Kramnik to soldier on and try to win despite the unjust forfeit of a key game. In the tenth round, Kramnik, with most of the chess world cheering him on, recovered his equilibrium and decisively disposed of Topalov on the White side of a Catalan. The match was now tied, and when the final two encounters both ended in draws, the contest was sent into an overtime series of rapid games. Kramnik defeated Topalov twice in the fast play and won the unified crown. Putin was pleased: Kramnik had beaten back the latest, nefarious threat to Russian domination of the World Championship.